Facebook Messenger Bots: How to set up Chatbot in 30 minutes or less

How to set up Chatbot: Chatbots have created hype in recent years. While many people believe that chatbots will replace everything, be it email marketing, mobile apps, or others, chatbots can be of great use when employed in the right way.

Every day more and more businesses are turning towards conversational marketing and trying to give their communication a personalized touch with chatbots.

With the whole world being hit by the pandemic and getting locked in homes, it has become even more urgent to establish smooth customer-business communication. A few years ago, creating and setting up a chatbot happened to be a daunting task. However, today the scenario has changed.

Let’s discuss what chatbots are, how they can benefit businesses, and also learn about some of the best chatbot practices.

What are Facebook Messenger Bots?

In simple terms, a chatbot uses AI technology to generate automated messages to converse with people.

The function of bots is to understand the queries, answer questions, and perform tasks. Seeing it from a customer’s point of view, using a chatbot is much convenient.

Customers don’t have to open an app, make phone calls, run searches, or spend their time struggling with the loading web page, instead, they can just type their message in the chatbot and get their queries solved.

Chatbots have been around us in the form of apps, on web pages, and on social media. A Facebook messenger bot is one such chat bot that businesses can utilize to escalate their query solving process.

Customers can simply click the “Message” option on your Facebook page and get directed to the Facebook messenger bot, where they can type their desired questions and get the relevant answers from the bot.

Why should you use Facebook Messenger Bots for your business?

A Facebook messenger bot can be of great advantage for businesses. But there are two major advantages of using it.

Have a read:

The first advantage is that building a Facebook messenger bot is much cheaper than developing apps. You can spend less but can attract more target audience through it since every month, people exchange more than 2 billion messages over Facebook with businesses.

So, if you want to communicate with your customers without thinking to invest much money and effort, you should go for a Facebook Messenger bot. 

Talking about the second advantage, the competition for a chatbot is less. Going through the data, Facebook has 6 million advertisers while only 300,000 chatbots. Also, if you see the marketing email rates, they haven’t improved since long.

So, there is a huge chance for chatbots to crash the inbox competition as well. 

How to set up ChatBot in 30 minutes? 

Chatbots have evolved in a positive way to help businesses perform customer service tasks efficiently. But building a chatbot may not be that easy for everyone. 

Look at the following steps to build a successful Facebook Messenger Bot in 30 minutes or less:

Sign up for a chatbot tool

To get started, you need to sign up for any chatbot tool. This you can do for free. You will then be prompted to log in to your Facebook account there and grant the tool to access your public profile and email address. 

Link your Facebook account there

Once you have logged into your Facebook page in the tool, you will again be directed to the dashboard of the tool where you will be shown a message that your Facebook profile has successfully been linked.

Create a Welcome message

The next step then is to create a welcome message to greet your customers when they open the Facebook Messenger Bot. This step is extremely important as it guides the users to what they should do and expect when using the bot. 

• Go to your Facebook page and click on “Settings” and then on “Messaging”.
• Click on “Show Messenger Greeting” and then click on “Yes”.
• Type your message in the message box and then click on “Save”.

Whenever the user clicks on the Message button, he will be displayed this message in the chatbot.  

Create a default reply

Sometimes users will ask a question that the bot can’t answer. In such a case, it’s better to prepare a default reply which you can set from your relevant tool’s dashboard.

• In the dashboard of the tool, click on the “Default Answer” button.
• Type in your default message there and click on “Save”.

Make use of AI

• In your tool’s dashboard, select ‘’Set Up AI” and then click on “Add AI Rule”
• In the dialog box that appears, you can enter and save the keywords that your users can probably ask about.
• Whenever anything similar to that keyword is asked, the bot will send a reply according to it.

Add the “Message” button to your Facebook page

The message option on which the user click has to be added there. 

• Go to “Facebook”
• Click on “Add a button”
• In the pop-up window that appears, select the “Contact you” or “ Message” option.
• You will get the option “Where to send the message”, select “Messenger” there
• The “Message” button will finally be displayed on your Facebook page and the messages will open in Messenger directly.

What Facebook Messenger Bots can help you do?

It can help you reach your audience directly

As per the survey by Headliner Labs, the chance for people to open a Facebook message is 3.5 times more than that of opening a marketing email. The second thing is that customers don’t even need to type the entire message. They just have to use the “Call To Action” button to get going with the chat.

So, there is more chance for customers to move down your marketing funnel. 

Besides, Facebook Messenger also gives you the advantage of sponsored ads, which can be utilized to send to the customers who have previously been in touch with your page. This means you are having a list of your subscribers. You just have to target this subscribers’ list with these ads. 

It can help you identify leads

These bots greet potential customers and take into account their details including likes and dislikes by asking questions. And finally, these high-quality leads are directed to the human sales team. 

It can handle your e-Commerce transactions

If developed correctly, bots can take care of selling too. Also, since the conversation is done through Facebook Messenger, the number of people leaving the transaction is low when compared to the traditional method of selling through the website. 

Another benefit is that bots can be programmed to send personalized messages to upscale the sales. 

You can save time and money spent on customer care

Customers don’t like to wait or being kept on hold. Instead, they expect availability 24/7. In some cases, they would even repeat the same questions over and over again.

So, if you are spending most of your time helping people check the deliveries, check the return policy, or booking appointments, there would be very little room for your business to escalate.

Having a Facebook Messenger bot can easily solve this issue and you can shift your focus on building strategies for your business. 

It can help you re-engage with your customers

Bots can store the information of your customers which can further be utilized in your marketing campaign, rather than spending an extra amount on Advertising. These bots can be used to offer relevant content to your potential customers at the right time.

Tools to build Facebook Messenger Bots

There are many tools that you can use to build Facebook messenger bots. Some of them are:

Streamchat

This is the most basic but the best chatbot tool, to begin with. This tool can help you with simple automation and autoresponders like “How can I help you?” or “We will get back to you soon”.

Streamchat is easy to implement and use but we would recommend this tool just to the newbies.

Chatfuel

This is one of the largest social media platforms for building Facebook Messenger bots. The client list of Chatfuel is amazing.

You don’t need to have a coding background to create a chat bot having an intuitive visual interface if you are using this tool. Chatfuel helps you build bot for free and you can also go for the pro accounts if you want to create more complex chatbots. 

MobileMonkey

When you choose mobilemonkey, you can get access to many features like Live Chat Takeover, Custom Attributes, Q/A Triggers, Chatbot Templates, and more. There is an additional feature called “Chat Blast”, through which you can send messages to multiple users at the same time. 

And with its “Pro” plan, you can get important features like scheduling, drip campaign setup, and analytics. 

ManyChat

ManyChat offers you plenty of tools that can help in your bot promotion and evaluation of user analytics. ManyChat is free to use at first but later you will have to pay for it as you hit the dedicated number of subscribers. 

Chatkit

If you are looking for enterprise-level solutions, you should go for Chatkit. It gives you the feature of automated Facebook messaging, SMS messaging, and Google chat. You can integrate this tool with Zendesk and Shopify as well. 

Best practices to build Facebook Messenger Bots

Here, have a look at some of the best practices that you can implement while building Facebook Messenger Bots:    

Be clear in setting your expectations

While building the chatbot, you must keep your expectations clear, i.e. what do you want your chatbot to do.

Certain features need to be integrated with your Facebook Messenger Bot like lead identification, customer service, product promotion, etc and you should keep these things in mind while creating a chatbot. 

Know your customer’s expectations

Setting expectations works both ways. You should take special care of your customer expectation as well. If a customer using your bot won’t get his/her answers in the earlier stage only, he or she will get frustrated and leave the conversation. 

Therefore, you should program the bot in a way that it is capable of answering your customer’s questions throughout and can take the lead in conversation, suggesting to your customers about the various deals and offers. 

Customize the preferences

Do you know what drives engagement when using chat bot? It’s the touch of personalization. Bots that can identify a customer’s expectations and needs have a much higher click-through rate. People genuinely want to attract such bot, thereby enhancing the engagement. 

Get straight to the point

The purpose of a bot is to save time. So, your focus should be to build a bot that can help the customers with their queries in the initial round of conversation only. 

Keep a human hand ready

A successful bot is one that can understand when human assistance is needed. No doubt, automatic conversations are responsive and fluent but they can never replace the need for human connection.

Customers should at any point have the option to get connected with human help.  

Maintain transparency

While you know that a bot’s most attractive feature is that it can store the user’s data but be clear with your users about what data you would be storing and how that data can be used.

 When you maintain such transparency with your users, you are giving them the power of privacy over information. 

Keep learning

Once your bot is built, you can integrate your bot into Facebook strategy and your marketing calendar. Your Facebook messenger bot can give you the feature of customer service, and app experience, therefore, you must take the advantage of Facebook messenger bot. 

While you are using a bot, keep an eye on the latest trends and performances that keep on evolving in the marketplace. 

Conclusion 

A chatbot is of utmost importance if you are a business looking to save your time and effort and maximize the speed of customer service. And setting up a chatbot is not that hard as it may sound.

With the above-mentioned steps, we hope you would not face any difficulty in setting up the chatbot in no time. Have any queries? Drop it in the comments section.